Every creative professional I’ve ever met, spoken to, or worked with shares a quiet, ambient frustration about meetings. I’ve been in (and if I’m honest, run) status meetings that weren’t really about status. Reviews that didn’t produce any usable feedback or approvals, alignment meetings where everyone left thinking they were aligned, but with three different interpretations of what was decided, and - my personal favorite - the weekly sync meeting that exists simply because it always has.
This frustration runs in both directions. The team feels it — they’re pulled away from making the work to talk about the work in rooms that don’t seem to move anything forward. As leaders, we feel it too. We sit through the same meetings, have a vague sense of drift and misalignment, and end the week wondering where the time went. Both sides leave bad meetings feeling the same way: that hour should have been spent somewhere else.
The frustration is universal across creative production. Sure, the specific meeting names change between games, agencies, animation, in-house creative, and software product teams... But the experience doesn’t. The bad meeting is the same bad meeting everywhere.
The dominant response I see is some flavor of: Let’s just cut meetings; have fewer meetings; make them shorter; default to async; audit your calendar and delete anything that doesn’t earn its place. This advice is everywhere, it sounds reasonable, and it doesn’t solve much of anything.
Meetings Aren't The Problem
Creative teams need meetings because cross-discipline creative work requires the kind of in-the-moment, shared-context thinking that async communication can’t deliver. The designer, the producer, the engineer, and the director need to be in the same room sometimes. The account lead, the creative director, and the strategist need to be in the same room sometimes. There’s no Notion doc that replaces five people figuring something out together while looking at the same screen.
The cut-meetings answer treats meetings as overhead. But meetings can (and should be) a working tool — production and communication infrastructure that lets cross-discipline teams move together. Removing the tool doesn’t fix the underlying problem. It just relocates the problem into slower, more diffuse forms like longer Slack threads where context evaporates or wandering email threads that end up generating more questions and confusion than they solve.
So the real question isn’t “how do we have fewer meetings,” but “why do so many of the meetings feel pointless?”
The Missing Decision
The answer is upstream of the meeting itself.
Bad meetings are usually bad because no one decided what the meeting was actually about. The calendar invite says “Design Review” or “Sync” or “Weekly Check-in” — labels that describe a category, not a purpose or outcome. Everyone walks in with a slightly different idea of what’s about to happen. The person running the meeting often hasn’t made the call either (I can say I, myself, have made this mistake… a lot), so the meeting drifts toward whatever the loudest voice or most senior person in the room wants it to be.
This is the missing decision. What is this specific meeting’s purpose, and how am I going to run it to get that outcome?
The decision is small. It’s often a five-minute thought before the meeting starts, sometimes less. It’s invisible to everyone else in the room… I mean, yes, you could put it in the agenda that no one reads… But this decision is the difference between a meeting that moves the work forward and a meeting that takes an hour from twelve people and produces nothing the team can use.
As you can imagine, many folks skip this decision because they don’t realize it’s a decision. They inherited a calendar full of recurring meetings, they accepted them, and they show up to them. The meeting happens, the meeting ends, the meeting was bad, and no one’s sure why.
It was bad because the meeting didn’t have a purpose. Or it had one, but no one in the room knew what it was. Unfortunately, same outcome.
The Move
The move is to decide what job the meeting is for before it starts, and make that explicit at the top of the room.
That’s really it.
It sounds trivial, and it isn’t. The reason is that most creative meetings could be doing any of several different jobs, and those jobs require very different behaviors from everyone in the room (and often different people in the room entirely). When the purpose isn’t clear, every person in the room makes their own assumption about what the meeting is for and behaves accordingly. The meeting ends with each person feeling differently about what just happened.
Name the job and the meeting becomes runnable. Skip it and you’re hoping.
This pattern shows up in every kind of meeting a creative team has — alignment meetings, decision meetings, status meetings, kickoffs, retrospectives, stakeholder reviews. But the place it shows up worst, and the place the cost is highest, is in feedback meetings. So that’s where I want to spend the rest of this piece.
The Feedback Case
Feedback meetings — design reviews, creative crits, work-in-progress check-ins, demo days, whatever the org calls them — are the meetings where the missing decision hurts most. The team has spent days or weeks producing work. They bring it to the room expecting something specific to happen, but they don’t know what. The leaders in the room arrive with their own assumptions, also unstated (and at worst, outdated). Everyone speaks past each other for an hour. The team leaves uncertain what was agreed, what they should change, or what they should keep.
This is so common that creative leaders have stopped noticing it. They think it’s just how feedback meetings go.
It isn’t, at least it shouldn’t be. A feedback meeting could be doing one of four jobs. They look similar from the outside. They require very different behaviors from the leader, the team, and the work itself.
The gate. The meeting exists to decide whether the work moves forward as-is, moves forward with changes, or goes back. The leader’s job is to make a call. The team brings the work, presents it clearly, and answers questions. Running a gate without making the call defeats the meeting.
The critique. The meeting exists to surface specific issues with the work that the team should address. The leader is there to give detailed, specific feedback on craft — not directional notes, not “I’m not sure about this part,” but the actual notes the team can act on. The team listens, takes notes, asks clarifying questions, and resists the urge to defend. A critique that produces vague feedback isn’t a critique; it’s a meeting that wasted everyone’s time.
The exploration. The meeting exists to think together about a creative problem that the work has surfaced. Here we, as leaders, are collaborators, not deciders, and the team should bring half-formed ideas without being afraid of them. Exploration meetings die the moment a leader starts making calls — and worse, they teach the team not to bring half-formed and exploratory thinking next time… Which, in any creative field, is… “The bad”.
The alignment check. The meeting exists to make sure everyone in the room agrees on what the work is trying to do before evaluating whether it’s doing it. The leader listens for divergence and surfaces it. The team articulates the brief as they each understand it. The point is shared intent, not feedback on execution. The moment an alignment check slides into critiquing craft, it’s stopped doing its job.
These are four different purposes. The leader’s posture in each is different. The team’s posture in each is different. The success criteria are different. And each of them is a legitimate, useful meeting on its own terms.
The failure isn’t running any of these. The failure is running a meeting that’s trying to be all four at once, with no one in the room knowing which is which.
What the Move Looks Like in Practice
The leadership move in a feedback meeting is small and concrete.
Before the meeting, decide which of the four jobs this meeting is doing. Not “design review” — that’s a label. “We need to align on whether the feedback we got reflects problems worth acting on before we talk about fixes” — that’s a job with a clear outcome.
At the top of the meeting, say it out loud. “This is an alignment check. We’re going to talk about which of these observations we actually believe and whether they’re problems worth solving. We’re not going to talk about how to solve them today — that’s a different conversation, with a different group of people in the room.” Say it before anyone has a chance to start solving… Though I recommend saying it in a less robotic and terrible way than I spelled out here.
When someone in the room tries to shift the meeting into a different mode — and someone will — name it and decide whether to follow the shift or hold the line. “That’s a real question, but it’s a how question, and we agreed we were doing the if question today. Let’s note it and come back to it in the right meeting.” Most of the time, you hold the line. Occasionally, you decide the shift is the right call, and you make that explicit too: “Actually, this might mean we need a different meeting than the one I called. Let’s stop here and reset.” I’ve seen this happen too, usually when you have a planned job or outcome for the meeting, but it’s the wrong one.
This is unglamorous work. It’s not strategic vision. It’s not motivating the team. It’s the small, repeated discipline of knowing what the meeting is for and refusing to let the meeting pretend to be something else.
What Changes
The feedback case is one application of a larger pattern. Since every meeting a creative team has could be doing several different jobs, the work is to decide which job, before the meeting starts, and make the call explicit. This holds for alignment meetings, decision meetings, status meetings, kickoffs, retrospectives, stakeholder reviews. Each one of these can do real work or pretend to. The difference is whether someone decided what the meeting was for.
You don’t need to do a major overhaul of your calendar to start. You need to start asking one question before every meeting you care about: what’s the job of this meeting, and how am I going to run it to do that job? Answer it before the meeting starts. State the answer at the top of the room. Hold the room to it. This will help you not just “reduce meetings”, but make sure that the meetings you have are, you know, useful.
When leaders do this consistently, two things change. Individual meetings get noticeably better — the team leaves knowing what happened and what’s next. And the team learns to expect that clarity, which means they start asking for it when it’s missing. The whole meeting culture shifts toward purpose. Thankfully, a shift not due to any new policy (which I know from experience won’t actually help), but because people started doing the work upstream of the meeting itself.
Meetings aren’t the problem. Meetings without a purpose are. Defining that purpose and the outcome is the work.
Shawn Ketcherside has spent 25+ years in game production and creative leadership, and is now building tools for leaders of creative teams. You can find him on LinkedIn.